


A God in Ruins

by Fjallsarlon



Category: Long Gone Days (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 17:25:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18451202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fjallsarlon/pseuds/Fjallsarlon
Summary: No one questioned, except that Rourke is now questioning just about everyone and everything and suddenly it is all Adair can do not to throw up inside his mouth at how fast everything has fallen apart. A character study of Adair.





	A God in Ruins

“A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson, _Nature_

* * *

 

**i. an intuition of mortality**

No rhymes for him; none of those jangling children’s rhymes, full of nonsense—after one false-flag operation on the surface, Gaheris laughs and tosses a book at Adair, and he fumbles but catches it. Adjusts his glasses.

“What is it?” he asks, curtly. Still aware that the Raven Squad insignia he wears is all too new; that there is a distance there that only time can stitch shut.

“Fuck if I know,” Gaheris says, but Adair pockets it and reads it, because he’s still curious, still new—this is before he learned that curiosity is better buried and itches are better left unscratched.

(He leafs through it at night. Colourful, with pictures, and he puzzles out the words slowly. They’re nonsense rhymes. He’s disappointed. A child’s scrawl on the pages: _Mummy, Daddy, and me!_ He closes the book and trades it for extra bandages. Surface souvenirs of any sort are always in demand, and there’s never such a thing as too many bandages.)

The rhymes Adair knows aren’t things of nonsense; they’re rhymes he learned growing up, ways to commit the entirety of the human body and its complexity to a young boy’s memory. He remembers other things with these trainee’s rhymes: yawning in a lecture room, as the instructor drones on and on about the muscles in the hand.

They don’t talk about death. Not yet. But there are so very many parts, and even with the rhymes to hang them all together, Adair is wondering: what happens when it all goes so very wrong.

* * *

 

**ii. the last light of the sun**

The sun is going down; the pale lozenge of light through the glass windows of the makeshift field hospital is shrinking away, and Adair is young enough to feel a twinge of sorrow at its passing. (Not the hardened carapace of cynicism: not yet; that will come later. Gaheris, though, insists he’s never been young.)

He moves among the casualties, one by one. They’re supposed to have a field surgeon, but the field surgeon isn’t here—something to do with a rail incident, rumour has it, but Sergeant Riley is already stomping down all other rumours with jackboots. (If it’s a rail incident, Sorcha says, they’re going to be out here longer than expected. Aren’t they? October Company is growing restive but that isn’t any of Adair’s business, since his world has narrowed to the four confines of the small hotel-turned-field hospital.)

Donlan is on the mend; Katla is blushing as the story of her injury (tripped over a loose piece of masonry and fell and needed stitches) is shared across the ward again. Ian swears that he really can’t see, that he’s not making it up, but Adair isn’t so sure. Still, Sorcha’s written him as a casualty and Adair isn’t about to fight the senior medic on this.

He checks on the last few members of October Company—tinnitus, tinnitus, tinnitus, and Adair swears blind that he never, ever wants to see a tinnitus epidemic ever again, and Lyall barely meets his eyes and hums and insists he can’t hear a word Adair is saying, which is suspicious in and of itself, but Adair is beginning to learn the difference between field medicine and the neat diagnoses of the lecture theatre.

He’s there when the sole casualty from December Company dies.

This sheer coincidence, the pieces moving just-so, such that it is Adair and not Davies (off fetching more casualties from where October and December Companies have dug in) who is there when Elspeth begins to struggle for breath, and all of Adair’s world narrows still further: to this bed and the small lozenge of failing light from the window.

He doesn’t know how long he’s attempted CPR. It’s Davies’ hand on his shoulder that jolts him out of it, that reminds him of what he should have known. Haloed in the last light of the dying sun, they tug the thin field tarp over her face and bow their heads for a moment.

Then, Adair returns to the work.

* * *

 

  **iii. the two-bullet prayer**

They teach him to use a handgun.

Adair doesn’t take to it. He’s an indifferent shot; he barely passed the basic rifle training before it was classes and classes and more classes, the crook of both elbows acquiring the faint pale scars of needle-tracks as they practised inserting IVs into each other.

There’s a joke—only among medics; it is not something they speak of amongst the rest of the company—that these handguns only have two bullets.

Officially, the sidearms they’re issued are for the greatest extremity: for when a medic must take up the gun and fight to defend their life, or the life of their charge.

(Unofficially, they call it the two-bullet prayer, because if your medic needs to fight, then your medic only really needs two bullets.)

The gun kicks in his hand and recoil jerks his aim off; the bullet punches through the edge of the target silhouette—barely a flesh wound, that, Adair thinks idly—and he sighs as the next target silhouette moves up and he frowns and takes the shot all over again.

(He’d kept the bullet they’d removed from Elspeth’s ribcage. A Core bullet, that, and Adair files it away in a neat little mental box and buries it deep.)

* * *

 

**iv. still the raven knows**

Word spreads around Raven Squad days before Sergeant Coyle’s replacement posts in, and Adair knows Rourke’s name even before the new sniper speaks, and already he hates him.

It’s a small, petty thing on top of another small petty thing; an accumulation of small, petty things, and it swells up in him and chokes him and he coldly tells the replacement to stay focused, and hates him: hates the freshly-starched Raven Squad insignia he wears—and this being his first deployment!—and thinks of Fergus and the man’s friendly, warm smile and the knife behind it.

It doesn’t hurt now that he knows better.

Elspeth, of course. It has always about Elspeth, since that day at the field hospital half a decade ago; always rumours that the medics would be just too late—just too ineffective, but somehow it would be different if you were friends, if they cared about you, and Adair is sick, just sick of it today, and not in any mood to take that same bullshit from the newcomer.

He lashes out at Rourke and maybe he regrets it, just a little, but Rourke is new, and the last thing they need is to get attached to a greenhorn who’ll probably fuck up in the field and get seasoned, toughened veterans killed.

* * *

 **v.**   **fallen from grace**

He considers it, for a few moments—really considers it—bashing Rourke in the head with the butt of his handgun and manhandling the recalcitrant replacement back to HQ, back to Lieutenant Gareth, and throwing himself on the Core’s mercy, because clearly he didn’t expect this whole act of kindness to a overwrought and hysterical rookie to turn into a whole great escape, with half of Raven Squad on their collective asses, and somehow he’s _wanted_ now, and half of his future—what future?—seems to have vanished with the coil of thin smoke off the muzzle of Rourke’s slung sniper-rifle.

No. Adair had never intended any of it, but somehow it had spiralled out of control and out of control was the _last_ thing he wants and he struggles to just breathe past the panic, past the drones—the memory of the drones—and the soldiers and their orders, and—and breathes. Just breathes.

He was proud—startles himself with the past-tense, but past-tense it nevertheless is—to be attached to Raven Squad; to have left October Company behind for what he had presumed, naturally, to be better and more prestigious deployments, and somewhere along the line, it had been less about upholding the Core’s values and more about opaque operation after operation, deployments with motives so tangled Adair felt a prick of conscience about what they were doing, and then viciously buried it deep down because this was Raven Squad, the best of the best, and no one questioned, except that Rourke is now questioning just about everyone and everything and suddenly it is all Adair can do not to throw up inside his mouth at how fast everything has fallen apart.

One thing leads to another, Adair supposes: cause-and-effect, the delay between the hand on the trigger and the flight of the bullet, and here they are, Rourke’s hand in his, Rourke screaming for them to jump, Adair just screaming because everything in his medical training hasn’t prepared him for an utterly crazy rookie to shove them both off a bridge and into the water.

You don’t question orders, but Rourke has opened the fucking boxes, and now all of Adair’s questions lead him back to one particular day: as the day fades to dusk in a field hospital and a bloodied Core bullet in his hand, recovered from a soldier’s ribcage.

 _Did you ever care_ , Elspeth asks, and Adair wonders if that’s what conscience sounds like.

From grace, he falls.


End file.
